Blur

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2005)

Paul Verhoeven makes movies that pollute the eye. If you are serious about movies, you cannot avoid bad ones. In fact, if you love movies, you love bad ones as well.
But that's not the same as tolerating crassness, as deliberately allowing a vulgar non- appreciation of films by filmmakers into your soul. This isn't a dialog, building an imagination. You don't have to have "both sides," the artful and the sidewalk dust.
So on the list goes Michael Bay. He just doesn't seem to have anything useful to offer. Sure, there is a lot of movement of the kind you can get by huffing gas, but there isn't the same color that you can get from someone who can actually speak, like say Tony Scott or his brother.
There used to be a genre, a science fiction summer movie genre. You'd start with some clever setup. Most old science fiction was engineered to exploit some societal foible or devise a means to encounter self, sometimes both. We have that setup here, though borrowed from all over with no attention to annealing the seams.
Then you'd add some tension and action and naturally some love. But it all worked because the container was big and solid. The science fiction cover allowed the contents to be brash. Thing even about "The Chronicles of Riddick" or even the Matrix things and my "Constantine." They worked as what they were because the container was solid.
There's effectively no container here, nothing but the noise.
Its all so hard to grasp. Evan McGregor knows how to do the folded acting thing. He's already been in two of the most accomplished films of the last ten years: "Pillow Book" and "Moulin Rouge," plus some tolerable ones. Miss Scarlett knows how to pose to imply intelligence, usually adding something.
Oh well. Sometimes I say a film isn't worth watching. This time I say watching this can do you harm. Put Bay on your hazardous list.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.